Tahget said, ‘My company certainly wouldn’t touch your poxy little globe with a gloved hand, acolyte. Perhaps we won’t anyhow.’ A vein throbbed in his forehead. ‘So we are all puppets of those illusionists. And there’s not one of them within light years, whose head I can crack open!’
Mara had listened to all this. Now she said, ‘None of this matters. What does matter is me, and my daughter.’
‘And your bomb,’ said Poole softly.
‘Take me back to my cabin,’ she said. ‘And don’t ask me to leave it again before we get to Chandra.’
With a curt nod, Tahget dismissed her.
Futurity went back to his own room. He was relieved the little crisis was over, but his cheeks burned with shame and anger that this whole incident had been set up to get at his own Ecclesia - that another Guild should be responsible - and it had taken Poole to see it, Poole, a Virtual designed by the Idealists themselves!
But as he thought it over, he did see how alike the two Guilds were. And, he couldn’t help wondering, if the Idealists were capable of such deception, could it be that his own Ecclesia would not be above such dirty tricks? It was all politics, as Poole would probably say, politics and money, and a competition for the grubby trade of refugees and pilgrims. Perhaps even now the Ecclesiasts were plotting manoeuvres just as underhand and unscrupulous against their rivals.
An unwelcome seed of doubt and suspicion lodged in his mind. To burn it out he took his data desk and began furiously to write out a long report on the whole incident for his Hierocrat.
But before he had completed the work he was disturbed again. This time it wasn’t Mara who was causing trouble for the crew, but Poole - who had gone missing.
Tahget met Futurity in the observation lounge.
Futurity said, ‘I don’t see how you can lose a Virtual.’
Tahget grunted. ‘We know he’s being projected somewhere. We can tell that from the energy drain. What we don’t know is where. He isn’t on the monitors. We’ve checked out all the permitted zones by eye. What’s he up to, acolyte?’
Once again Futurity found himself flinching from Tahget’s glare. ‘You know, Captain, the way you use your physical presence to intimidate me—’
‘Answer the question!’
‘I can’t! I’m on this voyage because of Poole - believe me, I wish I wasn’t here at all - but I’m not his keeper.’
‘Acolyte, if you’re hiding something . . .’
Futurity was aware of a shadow passing over him. He turned.
There was Poole.
He was outside the hull, standing horizontally with his feet on the window’s surface, casting a diffuse shadow into the lounge. He was dressed in a skinsuit, and he looked down at Futurity with a broad grin, easily visible through his visor. The Virtual rendition was good enough for Futurity to see the pattern on the soles of Poole’s boots. Behind him, entangled ships drifted like clouds.
Futurity gaped. ‘Michael Poole! Why - how—?’
‘I can tell you how,’ Tahget said. He walked up to the window, huge fists clenched. ‘You hacked into your own software, didn’t you? You overrode the inhibiting protocols.’
‘It was an interesting experience,’ Poole said. His voice sounded muffled to Futurity, as if he was in another room. ‘Not so much like rewriting software as giving myself a nervous breakdown.’ He held up a gloved hand. ‘And you can see I didn’t do away with all the inhibitions. I wasn’t sure how far I could go, what was safe. Futurity, I think it’s possible that if I cracked this visor, the vacuum would kill me just as quickly as it would kill you.’
Futurity felt an urge to laugh at Poole’s antics. But at the same time anger swirled within him. ‘Poole, what are you doing out there? You’re the only one Mara trusts. All you’re doing is destabilising a dangerous situation, can’t you see that?’
Poole looked mildly exasperated. ‘Destabilising? I didn’t create this mess, acolyte. And I certainly didn’t ask to be here, in this muddled century of yours. But given that I am here - what do I want out of it? To find out, that’s what. That’s all I ever wanted, I sometimes think.’
Tahget said, ‘And what did you go spacewalking to find out, Poole?’
Poole grinned impishly. ‘Why, Captain, I wanted to know about your Hairy Folk.’
Futurity frowned. ‘What Hairy Folk?’
Tahget just glared.
Poole said, ‘Shall I show him?’ He waved a hand. A new Virtual materialised beside him, hanging in the vacuum. Its fragmentary images showed shadowy figures scurrying through the ship’s corridors, and along those translucent access tubes that snaked between the intertwined ships.
At first they looked like children to Futurity. They seemed to run on all fours, and to be wearing some kind of dark clothing. But as he looked closer he saw they didn’t so much crawl as scamper, climbing along the tube using big hands and very flexible-looking feet to clutch at handholds. There was something odd about the proportions of their bodies too: they had big chests, narrow hips, and their arms were long, their legs short, so that all four limbs were about the same length.
‘And,’ Futurity said with a shudder, ’that dark stuff isn’t clothing, is it?’
For answer, Poole froze the image. Captured at the centre of the frame, clearly visible through an access tube’s translucent wall, a figure gazed out at Futurity. Though this one’s limbs looked as well-muscled as the others, it was a female, he saw; small breasts pushed out of a tangle of fur. Her face, turned to Futurity, was very human, with a pointed chin, a small nose, and piercing blue eyes. But her brow was a low ridge of bone, above which her skull was flat.
‘A post-human,’ Futurity breathed.
‘Oh, certainly,’ said Poole. ‘Evidently adapted to micro-gravity. That even-proportioned frame is built for climbing, not for walking. Interesting; they seem to have reverted to a body plan from way back in our own hominid line, when our ancestors lived in the trees of Earth. The forests have vanished now, as have those ancestors or anything that looked like them. But a sort of echo has returned, here at the centre of the Galaxy. How strange! Of course these creatures would have been illegal under the Coalition, as I understand it. Evolutionary divergence wasn’t the done thing in those days. But the Galaxy is a big place, and evidently it happened anyhow. She doesn’t look so interested in the finer points of the law, does she?’
Futurity said, ‘Captain, why do you allow these creatures to run around your ship?’
Poole laughed. ‘Captain, I’m afraid he doesn’t understand.’
Tahget growled, ‘Acolyte, we call these creatures “shipbuilders”. And I do not allow them to do anything - it’s rather the other way around.’
Poole said cheerfully, ‘Hence the ship’s name - Ask Politely!’
‘But you’re the Captain,’ Futurity said, bewildered.
Poole said, ‘Tahget is Captain of the small pod which sustains you, acolyte, which I can see very clearly stuck in the tangle of the hull superstructure. But he’s not in command of the ship. All he does is a bit of negotiating. You are all less than passengers, really. You are like lice in a child’s hair.’
Tahget shrugged. ‘You insult me, Poole, but I don’t mind the truth.’
Futurity still didn’t get it. ‘The ships belong to these Builders? And they let you hitch a ride?’
‘For a fee. They still need material from the ground - food, air, water - no recycling system is a hundred per cent efficient. And that’s what we use to buy passage.’
Poole grinned. ‘I pay you in credits. You pay them in bananas!’
The Captain ignored him. ‘We have ways of letting the Builders know where we want them to take us.’
‘How?’ Poole asked, interested.
Tahget shuddered. ‘The Shipbuilders are nearly mindless. I leave that to specialists.’
Futurity stared at Poole’s images of swarming apes, his dread growing. ‘Nearly mindless. But who maintains the Ask Politely? Who runs the engines?
Captain, who’s steering this ship?’
‘The Hairy Folk,’ Poole said.
It was all a question of time, said Michael Poole.
‘In this strange future of yours, it’s more than twenty thousand years since humans first left Sol system. Twenty thousand years! Maybe you’re used to thinking about periods like that, but I’m a sort of involuntary time traveller, and it appals me - because that monstrous interval is a good fraction of the age of the human species itself.
‘And it’s more than enough time for natural selection to have shaped us, if we had given it the chance. The frozen imagination of the Coalition kept most of humanity in a bubble of stasis. But out in the dark, sliding between those islands of rock, it was a different matter: nobody could have controlled what was happening out there. And with time, we diverged.
‘After the first humans had left Earth, most of them plunged straight into another gravity well, like amphibious creatures hopping between ponds. But there were some, just a fraction, who found it preferable to stay out in the smoother spaces between the worlds. They lived in bubble-colonies dug out of ice moons or comets, or blown from asteroid rock. Others travelled on generation starships, unsurprisingly finding that their ship-home became much more congenial than any destination planned for them by well-meaning but long-dead ancestors. Some of them just stayed on their ships, making their living from trading.’
‘My own people did that,’ Futurity said. ‘So it’s believed. The first Engineers were stranded on a clutch of ships, out in space, when Earth was occupied. They couldn’t go home. They survived on trade for centuries, until Earth was freed.’
‘A fascinating snippet of family history,’ Tahget said contemptuously.
Poole said, ‘Just think about it, acolyte. These Hairy Folk have been suspended between worlds for millennia. And that has shaped them. They have lost much of what they don’t need - your built-for-a-gravity-well body, your excessively large brain.’
Futurity said, ‘Given the situation, I don’t see how becoming less intelligent would be an advantage.’
‘Think, boy! You’re running a starship, not a home workshop. You’re out there for ever. Everything is fixed, and the smallest mistake could kill you. You can only maintain, not innovate. Tinkering is one of your strongest taboos! You need absolute cultural stasis, even over evolutionary time. And to get that you have to tap into even more basic drivers. There’s only one force that could fix hominids’ behaviour in such a way and for so long - and that’s sex.’
‘Sex?’
‘Sex! Let me tell you a story. Once there was a kind of hominid - a pre-human - called Homo erectus. They lived on old Earth, of course. They had bodies like humans’, brains like apes’. I’ve always imagined they were beautiful creatures. And they had a simple technology. The cornerstone of it was a hand-axe: a teardrop-shape with a fine edge, hacked out of stone or flint. You could use it to shave your hair, butcher an animal, kill your rival; it was a good tool.
‘And the same design was used, with no significant modification, for a million years. Think about it, acolyte! What an astonishing stasis that is - why, the tool survived even across species boundaries, even when one type of erectus replaced another. But do you know what it was that imposed that stasis, over such an astounding span of time?’
‘Sex?’
‘Exactly! Erectus used the technology, not just as a tool, but as a way of impressing potential mates. Think about it: to find the raw materials you have to show a knowledge of the environment; to make a hand-axe you need to show hand-eye coordination and an ability for abstract thought; to use it you need motor skills. If you can make a hand-axe you’re showing you are a walking, talking expression of a healthy set of genes.
‘But there’s a downside. Once you have picked on the axe as your way of impressing the opposite sex, the design has to freeze. This isn’t a path to innovation! You can make your axes better than the next guy - or bigger, or smaller even - but never different, because you would run the risk of confusing the target of your charms. And that is why the hand-axes didn’t change for a megayear - and that’s why, I’ll wager, the technology of these spiky starships hasn’t changed either for millennia.’
Futurity started to see his point. ‘You’re saying that the Shipbuilders maintain their starships, as - as—’
‘As erectus once made his hand-axes. They do it, not for the utility of the thing itself, but as a display of sexual status. It’s no wonder I couldn’t figure out the function of that superstructure of spines and scoops and nozzles. It has no utility! It has no purpose but showing off for potential mates - but that sexual role has served its purpose and frozen its design.’
Futurity recalled hearing of another case like this - a generation starship called the Mayflower, lost beyond the Galaxy, where the selection pressures of a closed environment had overwhelmed the crew. Evidently it hadn’t been an isolated instance.
As usual Poole seemed delighted to have figured out something new. ‘The Ask Politely is a starship, but it is also a peacock’s tail. How strange it all is.’ He laughed. ‘And it would appal a lot of my old buddies that their dreams of interstellar domination would result in this.’
‘You’re very perceptive, Michael Poole,’ the Captain said with a faint sneer.
‘I always was,’ said Poole. ‘And a fat lot of good it’s done me.’
Futurity turned to the Captain. ‘Is this true?’
Tahget shrugged. ‘I wouldn’t have put it quite so coarsely as Poole. We crew just get on with our jobs. Every so often you have to let the Builders come to a gathering like this. They show off their ships, their latest enhancements. Sometimes they fight. And they throw those tubes between the ships, swarm across and screw their heads off for a few days. When they’ve worn themselves out, you can pass on your way.’
Futurity asked, ’But why use these creatures and their peculiar ships? Look at the detour we have had to make, even though we have a bomb on board! Why not just run ships under human control, as we always have?’
Tahget sighed. ‘Because we have no choice. When the Coalition collapsed, the Navy and the state trading fleets collapsed with it. Acolyte, unless you are extremely powerful or wealthy, in this corner of the Galaxy a ship like this is the only way to get around. We just have to work with the Builders.’
Futurity felt angry. ‘Then why not tell people? Isn’t it a lie to pretend that the ship is under your control?’
Tahget blinked. ‘And if you had known the truth? Would you have climbed aboard a ship if you had known it was under the control of low-browed animals like those?’
Futurity stared out as the Shipbuilders swarmed excitedly along their access tubes, seeking food or mates.
VI
With the encounter at 3-Kilo apparently complete, the Ask Politely sailed back towards the centre of the Galaxy. To Futurity it was a comfort when the ship slid once more into the crowded sky of the Core, and the starlight folded over him like a blanket, shutting out the darkness.
But ships of the Kardish Imperium closed around the Ask Politely. Everybody crowded to the windows to see.
They were called greenships, an archaic design like a three-pronged claw. Part of the huge military legacy of the Galaxy-centre war, they had once been painted as green as their names - green, the imagined colour of distant Earth - and they had sported the tetrahedral sigil that had once been recognised across the Galaxy as the common symbol of a free and strong mankind. But all that was the symbology of the hated Coalition, and so now these ships were a bloody red, and they bore on their hulls not tetrahedrons but the clenched-fist emblem of the latest Kard.
Ancient and recycled they might be, but still the greenships whirled and swooped around the Ask Politely, dancing against the light of the Galaxy. It was a display of menace, pointless and spectacular and beautiful. The Politely crew gaped, their mouths open.
‘The crew are envious,’ Futurity murmured to Poole.
‘Of course they are
,’ Poole said. ‘Out there, in those greenships - that’s how a human is supposed to fly. This spiky, lumbering beast could never dance like that! And this “crew” has no more control over their destiny than fleas on a rat. But I suppose you wouldn’t sign up even for a ship like this unless you had something of the dream of flying. How they must envy those Kardish flyboys!’
Futurity understood that while the Politely had fled across the Galaxy there had been extensive three-way negotiations between the Ideocracy, the Imperium and the Ecclesia about the situation on Politely. All parties had tentatively agreed that this was a unique humanitarian crisis, and everyone should work together to resolve it, in the interests of common decency. But Earth was twenty-eight thousand light years away, and the blunt power of the Kard, here and now, was not to be denied.
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